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Hauling a dead body through a forest at midnight makes Sawamura Eijun wonder if he needs to change up his cardio routine.
He’s completely out of breath. Ever since he stopped to help a man on the side of the road but accidentally clubbed him to death instead, he hasn’t been able to fill his lungs to satisfaction. It comes in shallow pants, the fear buzzing under his skin, muddling his ability to think.
Eijun should be able to handle a little bit of mental pressure. And a jaunt through the woods with a heavy weight is nothing compared to physical conditioning during spring training. Lugging a body around was a workout, right? Basically the same thing as making someone sit on your back for a push up. Since he’s a professional baseball player, one known for his endurance, he should be able to handle all of this. Carrying this body’s got nothing on running laps with three tires tied to his waist, or dragging his team from dead last to top of the league.
“Dead last,” Eijun whimpers to himself. He hopes the darkness will swallow the sound into the cacophony of crickets and owls and rustling leaves.
It doesn’t. The word dead rings through his mind in chorus, louder than before.
He takes a shuddering breath to focus on not curling up into a little ball of tears, and takes another step in the direction he thinks the lake is. It’s a blessing, Eijun tries to convince himself, that this happened in a part of Nagano that’s remote but close enough to home that he knows the woods like the back of his hands. That there’s a lake nearby so overgrown and dingy that no vehicles can access it easily and only the most gregarious of teenagers bother hanging around there. If he’s lucky, it’ll take ages for anyone to find a body in that water.
Eijun hasn’t been very lucky so far tonight, but optimism was also a strength of his.
He trips on a root.
The body tumbles out of his arms and Eijun falls on top, face smooshing into the man’s massive pecs. There’s a burning pain in his palm and his ankle, and immediately, Eijun knows his hand is sliced open from something undoubtedly dirty and his ankle is twisted worse than it’s ever been.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me!” he shouts, sitting himself up. Frustrated, he slaps the body’s chest with his good hand.
He slaps it again for good measure. Then, he pats it a few more times and rubs it a little, too, oddly impressed with his build.
It was hard not to notice how deceptively lean this guy was; Eijun’s limbs still burn from carrying him through the dark over uneven terrain. Fireman’s carry, princess carry. Piggyback for a short while, before he realized the body couldn’t hold onto his neck and kept flopping back into the dirt in highly noticeable gouges to the earth. But all the manhandling just made him uncomfortably familiar with the sheer muscle mass this guy was hiding, once he looked past the outrageously thick thighs. Chris would probably love comparing training menus with him.
Face tilted up to the moonlight, the guy looks about as young as Eijun. His hair is brown and shaggy, styled into a rat’s nest from the stress of the night. Behind the stains, the shirt was already hideous, even more so paired with his cargo shorts. Eijun fishes out a pair of rectangular glasses from his own pocket—he didn’t want them falling off to leave behind evidence—and slips them over the guy’s eyes. Like that, he could’ve been taking a quick nap. Not dead at all.
Well, the blood staining his mouth and chin kind of gave away that he was dead.
Oh, shit, he shouldn’t have started thinking. It was finally hitting him.
Eijun murdered someone. Literally. Eijun killed a man tonight.
But it wasn’t completely his fault! Maybe the police wouldn’t have arrested him. Eijun is hardly gonna ignore someone in need, so of course he pulled over to see if he could help the guy on the side of the road. And he’s not an idiot, either, so of course he grabbed a spare baseball bat from his backseat before approaching him, just in case.
When the man spun around to face him, bright red blood smeared across his face and hands, dripping onto his shirt—when he shouted, “Hey! What are you doing here?!” and ran at him, of course Eijun swung his bat. And swung again. And again and again and again, right at his head, until Eijun came to himself again and realized there was a body in front of him, blood on his bat, and a scream in his own throat.
Eijun had checked for a pulse, but the man had none. And when he checked for breath, he had none.
A perfectly reasonable accident.
He should’ve stayed at his car, by the road where it happened. Talked his way out of charges—he’s charming and famous, and even though he hated leveraging either, Eijun has too much to accomplish in life to get stuck in jail forever.
His mother would still be devastated, his father sick to know he raised such a heinous man. At least his grandpa would probably only be disappointed he didn’t call him for help hiding the body. But it would pass eventually. Probably.
He’d just had to own up to the murder— no, his accidental hand in someone’s permanent loss of living status—instead of running away like a coward.
But he ran.
And now Eijun is stuck in the woods on a cold autumn night, bleeding onto rotting leaves and feeling up a dead body under the judgemental gaze of the stars.
“What did I do?” he cries. He pitches forward, burrowing his head in the body’s toned stomach for comfort.
A hand pats him on the head.
Eijun screams. He bolts upright, ready to run until he puts a sliver of weight on his busted ankle, and instead scrambles away across the moist dirt until his back hits a tree trunk.
The man stands up. His neck cracks as he tilts it side-to-side. Head to toe, he moves his body in what looks like a thorough check of what parts are functioning correctly, humming as he reaches his toes and realizes he’s in working order except for a possibly broken skull. He takes off his glasses—already cracked from Eijun’s initial assault—and lifts them to the sky, peering through them as if to gauge their cleanliness, then grabs the hem of his shirt. Unfortunately for him, what bits of his shirt aren’t covered in dirt now were covered in blood earlier. They’d only make the glasses worse. He simply sighs, and shoves his glasses into a pocket.
Eijun sits as still as he can. He doesn’t even breathe, fighting the way his lungs ache for noisy gulps of air. He doesn’t want to be noticed. It was already a lot to process becoming an accidental murderer—even if it was only partially true, apparently. Possibly dying is a new level of fear he isn’t ready to deal with. And someone who’s managed to come back to life probably has a vicious streak of revenge to them.
The man looks up. Backlit by the bright full moon, his features are obscured in darkness.
Eijun chants in his head, Don’t notice me, don’t notice me. But when the man smiles, Eijun can see his teeth and tell it’s right at him.
“Next time you wanna beat up a guy and kidnap him, make sure he agrees to it first.” His voice is hoarse, as if it’s gone unused for a while, but it’s light and melodic in tone.
That’s the first thing he had to say? This man was a complete idiot! Eijun’s jaw drops. “I was protecting myself from you. You came running at me covered in blood!”
“You approached me first with a baseball bat.” He didn’t seem particularly interested in Eijun, categorizing the surroundings with a slow turn on his heel, taking a deep breath here and there. “And it’s pretty ballsy to try to hide my body instead of fess up. Did you really think it would work?”
“You were dead! You didn’t have a pulse or any breath, and there was blood all over your face!”
“Oh, the blood wasn’t mine.” Eijun waits for more of an answer. Miyuki doesn’t offer one. Instead, he walks over to where Eijun is cowering by a tree, his leisurely pace completely silent. He crouches, knees neatly brushing Eijun’s. Despite the way he looks drained of color, his eyes still gleam with warmth. This close, they’re mesmerizing.
The man sticks his hand out. With a devilish smirk, he says, “Miyuki Kazuya, member of the undead, at your service.”
Unthinkingly, Eijun grabs it. His sallow skin is somehow colder now than when he was unconscious, but his grip is firm. “Sorry for hitting you.”
“Hitting me?” Miyuki’s grip gets a little stronger. “That’s one way to put it. I may be undead, but I still feel it when a stranger smashes my head in with a baseball bat!”
Eijun yanks his hand back and begs, “Please don’t kill me, I’m sorry!”
Miyuki looks taken aback, but only shrugs nonchalantly. He stands back up, habitually brushing the dirt off his clothing. “If I want you dead, I don’t have to move a single finger. I could leave you here. There are things in this forest you’d never dreamed of that would get to you.”
Eijun puffs his chest out and declares with full, shaky, bravado, “If I could take you, I could take them.”
Miyuki throws his head back and laughs. It's a nice surprise—none of the supernatural manga Eijun reads feature smiley characters unless they're also way too secretly scary, and this guy in particular didn’t seem the type. This time when Miyuki reaches out his hand, Eijun doesn't hesitate, and he's pulled to his feet. Lucky for his exhausted, adrenaline-crashing self, Miyuki steadies him with a firm hold around his waist when Eijun feels the blood rush to his head in a woozy pulse.
“I’ll give you credit for being very, very tough,” Miyuki grins. “Despite the whole kidnapping thing, you did help me avoid something I didn’t want to deal with. And you didn’t drag me around by my hands or legs, either. That always makes my joints achy days after.”
How often did that happen to him?! “Always?”
Of course, Miyuki doesn’t answer that either. “Since you brought me all the way out here, seems it’s only fair to return the favor. Want a ride back to your car?”
Eijun casts a skeptical look down his body. “A ride how?”
Miyuki slaps his thigh. “You think these puppies are just for show?” he says, arching an eyebrow.
As cool as the autumn night is, Eijun’s cheeks burn hot. Eijun also hopes Miyuki wasn’t conscious during the minor groping earlier. If Eijun had known he was alive—or, well, undead—he wouldn’t have done it. “Fine, but I’m warning you, I’m pretty big, too.”
“If you can take me, I’m sure I can take you,” he smiles slyly with a half-lidded gaze, well-suited for a creature of the night.
When Eijun slips his hands up Miyuki’s back and over his shoulders and hops up to wrap his legs around his waist, Miyuki staggers a little. He jolts Eijun around, searching for a comfortable hold on his legs. “You weren’t kidding,” he says, voice slightly strained.
“What, no supernatural strength helping you out?” Eijun drops his chin into Miyuki’s shoulder and says softly into his ear, “You said you can take me.”
Miyuki’s low chuckle rumbles into Eijun’s chest, warm despite the cold press of his skin and the damp earth covering them both. “We’ll find out, I guess. Let’s go.”